Power Management
Chipsets offer support for power management on the computer. Most recent chipsets support a group of features that reduce the amount of power used by the PC during idle periods. These types of features are deemed important for a few reasons. First, many get concerned over the amount of power consumed by PC’s when they are left on for long periods of time. Secondly, with the use of laptops, many are concerned about the life of their battery.
Power management works through a number of BIOS settings that tell the computer when to shut down various pieces of hardware when it becomes idle. While, in theory, this is a good idea, it does sometimes get in the way. One example is that all-too-common wait time when returning to the computer to wait for the hard drive to power up. Sometimes, the hard drive will power down too soon, and when you come back, you have to wait a few seconds for the drive to power up again.
There are a number of terms commonly heard in relation to these power management features. Energy Star is a program started by the EPA to brand PCs that are considered energy efficient and incorporate power management. Most modern PCs are Energy Star compliant, and display its logo on the top of the screen when the BIOS boots up. Advanced Power Management or APM is the name given to the component in some operating systems (such as Windows 95) that works with the BIOS to control the power management features of the PC. APM allows you to set parameters in the operating system to control when various power management features will be activated. System Management Mode or SMM is a power-reduction standard for processors. This allows them to automatically and greatly reduce power consumption.
Memory Support
One of the biggest issues with chipsets is what types of memory they will support as well as how much.
One needs to pay attention to how the memory is supported. A chipset can support a certain amount of memory as well as is able to cache a certain portion of it. This means that a certain amount of the main system memory will be cached by the L2 cache, increasing performance. One of the more famous horror stories is the 430TX chipset by Intel. Although it could support up to 256MB of SDRAM, it could only cache the first 64MB of it. This meant that with memory amounts over 64MB, you were probably degrading the system’s performance by quite a bit. Because Windows 95 loaded itself into the higher memory areas, leaving the lower areas free for DOS compatibility, this meant that the OS and all system-critical applications were being hampered by the crappy cache support. This concern is really a non-issue today.
Consumers rarely need to concern themselves directly with what types of memory a chipset will support, mainly because the motherboard comes with memory slots for a certain type of memory. So, it will be quite obvious what you can and cannot use.
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